What do people mean when they talk about things? (Monty Python 1.12)
I‘m often struck by how quickly the buzz goes off news, which seems to me sometimes to bubble up and evaporate away like gossip, with all the afterburn of suffering that this implies, no less intense for its smaller scale. The dreadful actions at the turn of the century, whereby a near-half-team of rugby league players insinuated themselves, in a fashion I call rape, into the sexual company of a young woman who was with two of their team-mates is just one example. This took place in Sockburn, just around the road from where I live and perhaps for this reason is taking a little longer to leave my mind than it might otherwise.
No less aggravating was the apparent elision in most news reports of group sex, which is one thing, and rape, which is another, as if the dynamics of more-than-two-person sex inevitably give rise to situations in which one party can say a rape took place and another it did not; as if there is a causal relationship between group sex and rape.
Much has been written online, in feminist contexts and elsewhere, of the significant problems with this argument, and it is not my intention to rehearse these ideas here. The difficulty in writing politically about sex, consent and morality has been brought home to me in a manner rather more personal by a post, written by one friend of mine, in whose comments thread the words of another friend of mine were deleted, following which the comments thread itself was closed. The post was considering the group sex/gang rape tension I identify above.
The thread’s comments in general pressed the author to attend to the commenters’ wish that, in reclaiming for the idea of gang rape the notion of non-consensual group sex, the author not conflate all group sex with gang rape. There was discussion on issues of tone and good faith before the author went on to write another post in which she discussed the issues in the context of the trauma of her own rape, a personal and devastating experience on which I don’t presume to comment.
However, the exclusion from the discussion of one friend by another has set me thinking in the manner in which cultural studies mavens usually do: in the wider context of the issues involved. By this I don’t mean the primary issues around sex, rape, morality and consent but the way in which we discuss these issues in a feminist setting. There is a tension within the process of debate that can, I think, give rise to misunderstanding and anger.
This tension to my mind exists between the Enlightenment model of open debate around ideas and the minority discourse model, of which some kinds of feminism are I think an example, since despite the fact that women are not a minority, the experience of sexism can at times function in a similar way to the exclusion or restriction of the aspirations of minority groups. (I should add that I think the sharp end of the experience of sexism can often be mitigated by privilege of class, ethnicity and sexual orientation in a way that may not be the case with other kinds of minorities).
This tension gets exemplified when blogs discuss politicised ideas in spaces that are inherently “controlled” or “safe”, two notions that proceed directly from the second-wave thought that gives rise to the contemporary feminist. Where the authors reserve the right to control the tone of the discussion, censorship arises, and where censorship arises, the receipt of comments then becomes evaluative: should they be censored or not? This, I think, is what has happened at The Hand Mirror of late. In myriad ways we set the tone for our readers by our actions on our websites. Thus, conspicuous elimination of unwanted comments can set up an atmosphere of hyper-vigilance and hesitation both on the part of those who have a response to make and those who moderate the site discussion itself.
Additionally, in a discourse like classically second-wave feminism, there can be a syllogism around the rules that apply. If the personal is political, it’s possible to conflate the political back into the personal as a kind of reflex*, especially around issues of both individual and collective concern like sexuality, morality and rape. The horror of an individual rape belongs intimately to the one who has been raped, and yet an account of it is part of a wider discussion. This is fraught.
A third element is the time-pressure of activism and the need, especially in blogs that take a discursive position (however diverse) on issues, to always be commenting (ABC?) on what is happening in news media and in politics and society. The effort of posting and commenting in relative haste and under contextual pressure of anonymous trolling commenters (whom I consider a separate group from regular commenters who are excluded for specific reasons), combined with the risk of the personal/political conflation I suggest above, can make what might in a different context be more ruminative conversations aggravated, to say the least.
I don’t have a solution to any of this except trying to describe it, trying to understand it, in the long-winded and inconclusive manner I’ve done here. It vexes me that it seems to be the nature of the left to fragment, and vexes me further that I am caught up in such a fragmentation.
This post occurs in the context of a wider conversation with Giovanni and ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Emma whose recent Public Address post on a new magazine with at least one kind of female gaze in mind (supported by some targeted ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
market research) gives some idea of her own positioning in relation to the importance of separating the consensual and its possibilities, from rape.
That I haven’t engaged my fellow feminists in Mirrorland itself is not to take the position of antagonist, but rather to tip my hat to the continuing unfolding of narrative events over which I don’t have a lot of control. It’s also to acknowledge that hyper-busyness I point out above, which is itself a product of the modern feminist life. A dozen or more posts have succeeded those that raised my concern, while I play the role of epicure-philosopher here.
*case-in-point from these pages: depression and mental illness.
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{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the world would be a better place if people didn’t generalize so much. Or at least my internet experience would be less annoying! I don’t know how many times I have been irritated by blanket statements like “Women don’t like X…” Statements like that about sex or experiences of motherhood are really fraught because both are very central to my sense of who I am. It’s infuriating feeling like someone is holding up a distorted mirror to me and saying this is who you are, when it isn’t. Joan Williams, one of my favourite legal feminists, makes a compelling argument for something she call pragmatist incommensurability- the idea of it (crudely summarised) is that wherever you stand on such matters you acknowledge that your views and your sense of their truth comes from your own experience and accordingly, with an open heart and mind, you accept other people have their own truths even if you can’t feel them yourself.
In terms of moderating a blog/online community- I think it’s very boring when discussion degenerates into meta discussion of what is or is not acceptable as so many do. Clear and consistent policy is key. If debate has previously been allowed you can’t suddenly change the rules midway through. On the other hand I think its perfectly fine if you want your blog, which afterall no one is paying you to write, to run along the lines of “everyone has the right to agree with me and to tell me I’m great” (that’s my policy;))
Sometimes this policy is also at work in our professional environment, no?
Harvestbird an excellent post. I had deep issues with these events too and did write about my concerns directly.
Art and my Life’s last post was Weird Art Quiz
Thank you, and for your comments on Twitter too.
It’s hard to comment on this without relitigating the whole thing, which wouldn’t be very productive. But briefly, I don’t think my comments differed substantially in content from others in that thread, but the manner in which they were expressed was deemed to be unacceptable by two of the forum’s moderators. I might have been briefly astounded by the way it all came about, but I have no quarrel in principle – THM is not a public forum and has every right to establish how it wants conversations to be conducted.
As a point of substance, I thought in the second post the author smuggled in the same judgment of women who might be into group sex as the first one, but this time behind the screen of personal trauma, and I find that kind of move very problematic. Not because I don’t think one’s experiences, however painful, shouldn’t be brought to bear – I might have done the same thing myself, just recently, and probably unwisely – but rather because I don’t think they authorise one to judge somebody other than the people who caused that pain; in the case at hand, other women as opposed to gang rapists.
In the example of the PAS discussion on the Church linked to above, I never wanted the abuse suffered by members of my family to authorise me to speak to anything but the very specific topic of Church and abuse; in practical terms, it allowed my interlocutor to later explain my attitude towards Catholicism as a function of “the dark history” of my family.
So, yeah, I think it’s fraught.
Giovanni’s last post was The Museum of You (3): Something You Lost
I sat down last night and read the comments thread on Emma’s post as it stands from start to finish. It took about 90 minutes. (Last time I looked, it was about three pages long!) The main emotion I’m left with is to express sorrow and anger, Giovanni, at what your parents experienced. I thought the wiki-linked comment from the pseudonymous commenter that followed was in extremely poor taste.
It struck me that the challenges for commenters in that thread as a whole had elements in common with what we’ve been discussing here: narrative structures and subtexts, what ideas were mutually understood and accepted, what were subject to contestation.
I was also struck by the way in which the commenters whose invective against the RC church was the strongest had been in situations in which either they or their families members had been hurt by people within the church (words and actions) as children or young people. That is a particular kind of powerlessness that I’m not sure an adult convert experiences in the same fashion.
It is fraught, and obviously I’ve been mulling this for a while. I know I’m unhappy about what happened, but trying to think past that gut reaction becomes complicated.
Having to delete a whole bunch of trolly comments does affect your reaction to future comments – I’ve recently had to do it at PAS, and you do start thinking ’should I be deleting this’ a whole lot more than you used to. However I’m pretty happy to say out loud that I thought the accusation that G was ‘arguing in bad faith’ showed enormously poor judgement, given his history and standing in the wider Kiwi blogosphere.
The generalisations are infuriating, but then you end up with a discussion something like this.
“All X are Y”
“Actually, that’s not true, I’m an X and I’m Z.”
“Oh, so now you’re saying all X are Z! How can you do that *insert personal trauma here*”
And the ‘oh fuck this for a game of soldiers I’m off’ attitude is just so easy at that point, I dunno how many times I’ve been round that track.
So, at the moment, my approach is to simply not engage with that side of the argument, and simply concentrate on putting my own perspective as clearly and unemotively as I can.
Emma’s last post was Southerly: Special Guest Michael Laws on the Richard Worth Saga
For what it’s worth I thought you took care of the trolls in the thread Giovanni cites above with efficiency and a certain amount of grace. Long-term readers and commenters at PAS seemed well-tuned to the good faith or otherwise of the participants (which of course is the context your comment above suggests was not taken into account at THM).
I also think discussion communities benefit a lot from people with long experience of internet discussion more generally, yourself for example. If some people, moderators in particular, are mindful of the way in which these discussions function, they can have a role in encouraging and supporting those who want to contribute but don’t necessarily have that meta-awareness (yet). Not being bogged down by such awareness is the difficulty.
One thing I will say for THM, and I think it might be implied in your post: there is nothing harder on the Net than running a large but still functioning community when the subject is feminism, closely followed by politics in a wider sense. The temptation to err on the side of “oh, why don’t you just piss off” must be significant.
By the same token, I am fairly constantly astounded by how well the Public Address community regulates itself given its size and the fact it’s banned less than a dozen users in its lifetime. Emma is doing some fantastic and provocative work that benefits a lot from being fed into that forum I think, and the forum benefits in turn. It would be great to have some of your posts there as a speaker, Megan, for that very reason – I am thinking specifically of the ones on depression and on writing.
Giovanni’s last post was The Museum of You (3): Something You Lost
The challenges inherent in running such a community were indeed on my mind when I wrote this post, and indeed I think it is indicative of faith in one’s ideology (or in some contexts access to political power) that such blogs last at all.
I have said before that I think admiration for the regular and featured writers is a part of the glue that holds PA together, since unless one is mentally unbalanced, such admiration often begets civility. There seems a strong will among the majority of commenters that discussion not become irretrievable even on the most challenging topics. My lack of regular contribution there is largely because I lack, if I am honest, the emotional energy for the kind of debate that is such a community’s bread and butter. That’s no criticism; it’s just me.
Having said that, I am usually happy to write for whomever and wherever and if invited to contribute would do my best to scrub something up. I might not, however, be well fit to defend my thinking at length as many of the PAS commenters can do so impressively.
In my dealings with Suraya, the subject of my latest column, I was able to say to her, please feel free to join in the comments thread, because I can guarantee you’ll be treated with courtesy and respect. Being able to say that means a lot to me, and the community benefits from the contributions of those people, who wouldn’t enter a more hostile environment. Russell runs it probably very slightly looser than I would: there’s a troll there right now I’d have banned yesterday if I were him.
But I do love the way the PAS community, without much direction from its leaders, calls people on weak or inconsistent arguments rather than attacking people. It still gets fraught sometimes.
The lack of emotional energy is why i don’t post at PAS either
Art and my Life’s last post was Art in the Vernacular (Quiz answer)
It’s a terrific guarantee to be able to make and one that’s rare online I think. My experience of online communities has usually been that new arrivals must spend a few weeks working out who are the trolls, who the attention-seekers and who the unreliable narrators. That’s not to say such posters doesn’t exist on PAS
but the fact it’s not consistently the focus is good.
Having said that, I wonder if those who comment with similar regularity on, say, Kiwiblog feel the same about that environment? I ask because of the accusation that sometimes gets fired at PAS: that it’s relatively united functioning is a function of its left-liberalism. (The image I thought of is a petting zoo for left-liberals, which is too pejorative, but appealing enough to me that I mention it still.) I suspect not, but I wonder.
Oh, I don’t know about that. On average the PAS commentariat is marginally left of centre, but it’s also a community of various interests in which the differences of opinion are often significant. The Kiwiblog comments pages are nothing like that, and are hardly ever able to sustain a proper debate about anything. Batshit insanity soon prevails, and I refuse to believe that it’s simply a function of conservatives being wired that way.
Giovanni’s last post was The Museum of You (3): Something You Lost
That’s cool. I wanted the opinion of someone who was more familiar with both contexts than I. I almost never go into Kiwiblog. The sheer volume of hateful words disheartens me.
All four of my grandparents were conservatives and theirs was a different discourse: nationalistic, genteel and occupying in many ways territories now obliterated by the neo-liberalism of both our major political parties. Despite this, my mother’s parents were lifelong members of the National Party; they valued I think loyalty the highest.
Thanks for this post hb, and the thoughtful comments which follow it. Sorry it has taken a while for me to read it, it wouldn’t load on my work computer at all and I’ve hardly been on the home one for ages.
I need to think more about what you’ve written here, including the comments. For now I’d like to point out a couple of key differences between PAS and The Hand Mirror which I think play a role:
1. PAS has a large number of readers and commenters. THM would maybe have a tenth of that audience. This creates a smaller echo chamber!
2. Not all our writers at The Hand Mirror have a long history with online fora. I remember newsgroups, although I had to give that addiction up reasonably quickly. Moderation rules and decisions are subjective to a certain extent no matter how much you try not to be, and a lot of that comes out of the moderator’s comfort level in the particular forum at the particular time.
3. Recently The Hand Mirror has suffered an influx of very very horrible trolls (actually only about 2 – 5 individuals by my estimation but quite graphic threats of violence, including death threats and rape, and many of them). These have I hope largely been deleted before most readers would have seen them. None the less there is a toll from this stuff on the writers, especially those deleting those comments. You start to feel quite under siege and as Emma rightly explains your finger hovers on delete more as a result.
Ok, I better goto bed, it’s nearly midnight, oops!
Julie’s last post was Busy-ness
Thank you Julie for coming here and for your response at what I know is a ridiculously busy time for you. As all the commenters here have said, I/we can only salute the dedication and indeed commitment of anyone who maintains a political blog with dialogue and the exchange of ideas as its aim (as opposed to loose collectives of wingnuttery or authorial back-patting).
I accept that the PAS/THM comparison is of the apples/oranges variety. Large readers and commentariats seem to offer both threat and promise in terms of what will happen to a blog. And I am both sad and angry to here you and your fellow writers have been subject to such horrible trolling. Sometimes I think that there’s a steady percentage of people on the internet for whom it is wholly sport, who would smile and murder while they smile, as it were. It certainly gives some context to the events about which I wrote.
I am increasingly convinced that the history of the old usegroups, and members behaviour on them, is something like a sociology of the internet. I have certainly come across this view from sociologists, although I don’t have any sources to cite at present. I tend to think that some knowledge of this, some access to an overview of how people in groups tend to behave online, would be potentially helpful for moderators and writers alike. Emma has made reference to derailing for dummies in the past, which is a reflection of this kind of communal knowledge. This is one of the reasons why I cite these contexts; not (I hope) as a form of privilege but as evidence of the kind of painful cycles in which online discussants can get trapped.
I wonder if there is further research out there into how people behave in politicised online environments that could be parsed into a more general guide. What do others think?
Julie, I’m very sorry THM has been visited by hateful trolls. It sounds extremely upsetting.
If I could make a suggestion which you should feel free to disregard- Wordpress have got a setting whereby the first time anyone comments it is held for moderation. Something like that might make it harder for drive by nastiness from anonymous commenters and would also mean you could moderate in batches when you felt like it instead of having to try to be alert for it during the day.
HB There’s a ton of stuff written about online dynamics. Back in the olden days when I first discovered the internet I seem to remember someone writing a sociological study which was later published about how a Jane Austen email mailing list imploded. I once came across a game type thing someone had written which was trying to map Habermassian ideal speech situations onto an online discussion group. I can’t remember what you had to do to win though
For an informal and funny take on it I really like this taxonomy of flame warriors http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm
Speaking just for myself, while I’ll lurk from time to time, I don’t particularly enjoy on-line conversations with lots of participants. I feel like the dialogues that happen in those settings are often not very interesting (to me) or rather that the interesting bits get dumbed down or lost amongst the in-jokes, the jostling for place on the social hierarchy, and the endless negotiation about rules of engagement. That’s probably more about me than anything else. In real life I’m all about one on one interaction with people I like and find interesting rather than big parties too.
I guess what I would like to see–and I don’t really know how this could come about–is a more widespread awareness that online dynamics are even a thing that exists, or rather, that there’s predictability and consistency across different environments. I do think that wider or higher awareness means that while it may not be possible to prevent difficulties arising, their arrival is not completely out of the blue. Emma’s example about moderation below is I think an example of this.
I once belonged to a mailing list for people with Norwich Terriers which imploded after Hurricane Katrina, when one of the senior members made an offhand remark about the Republican Party handling the aftermath poorly, at which a significant number of members took irreparable offence. Things had been going downhill at that list, I guess, since the invasion of Iraq, when members’ political positionings became more obvious. (I sometimes wonder if I contributed to this by asking members to keep things secular and not post prayers to the site; this hurt some people’s feelings.)
I’ve spoken a couple of times on managing online communities. I always feel like what I’m saying is incredibly obvious, and people always react as if I’m saying something they haven’t really thought about before. I’d half-seriously pondered writing a book on how to do it, because the idea of making money off something that common-sense is satisfyingly ridiculous.
One of the things we do at Bardic Web is that if one member of the admin team is very closely involved in a dispute, especially if they’re emotionally involved, they step out and let another admin do the adminly bits of that. That would include not doing your own comment moderation on something that you’re overly sensitive on, but getting another member of the team to do it for you, or at least to double-check your decisions. We all have areas where we lose our impartiality, there’s no shame in that, and it’s better than over-reacting to something and making a total hash of it.
As far as the ‘apples and oranges’ thing goes, I’m dubious. My experience is that all communities suffer the same problems, trolling is always the same, and good strategies are good strategies. People who are new at community moderation need to be prepared to listen to and learn from people who aren’t. The fact that PAS is bigger and attracts more attention means that it should have MORE problems than THM, not fewer. It’s just that a smaller community has less inertia, so is easier to knock off balance.
I’ve been thinking over the last couple of days about the ways in which researchers into tertiary education–a field in which I have some toe-dips of experience–often argue that teaching and learning across the university would be improved if all scholars had some knowledge in this field. This argument is similar to how I feel about awareness of how online communities tend to function. While, as we’ve said earlier, we don’t want to moderators to feel paralysed or made paranoid by the role they take on, there’s the hope that when the community is self-conscious of how it functions, it can become self-correcting.
I’ve added a widget in the RH-column here called “Recent Discussions” so that when this post disappears off the front page, as it shortly will, anyone who wishes to continue commenting on it can. All posts in the widget will come from the Commentatrix category.
This is one of the most interesting discussions I’ve ever had at these pages and I thank you all for your participation.
For perhaps obvious political reasons, I’d like to see *large* functioning communities take place and prove sustainable on the Web. We used to have some, and didn’t need any stinking moderators (sorry Emma). People say it was trolling, but to a I think it was in fact blogging that killed Usenet, by claiming so many of the best writers and sane voices. Perhaps the model was never meant to survive, and some newsgroups were utterly toxic, but I still regret that loss.
Anyway, for what it’s worth I think the apple-oranges thing between THM and PAS has more to do with subject matter than size – political and feminist forums are troll magnets, that was also true of Usenet. PAS is not a political community as such, in spite of its broad political convergence.
(Although – and this is not mean metaphorically or to make any oblique point whatsoever, I have no problem in comparing apples and oranges. Oranges are far more delicious.)
Giovanni’s last post was The Pixel Years
I think conflict is absolutely inevitable in all online communities and I will tell you why. Heavy internet users, which probably includes every one of us, fall into a few categories 1. postgraduate students, academics, free lance journalists, aspiring novelists, generally people who have an intellectual bent who like writing and spend lots of time alone procrastinating at the computer (i.e PLU!) 2. bored lonely SAHMs 3. the unemployed 4. isolated people with no social life, perhaps lacking somewhat in social skills, who are overly invested in their online life 5. psychopaths 6. raving lunatics. There’s plenty of overlap between these categories and I’ll be completely honest and admit I’ve probably been all of them to one degree or another (apart from category 5 and 6) Mix all of these people together, as inevitably happens online, and you don’t end up with healthy functional representative cross section of society, what you end up with is inevitable conflict and and quite a few borderline dysfunctional people(none of us obviously!) who are not really playing by the same rules and who do not, in fact, have a shared common purpose. No amount of category 1 people explaining the nuances of the norms of the community or pointing out the underlying dynamics is going to change the behaviors of people who simply don’t care. The question is really how much conflict you can tolerate and what compromises you make to avoid it.
For a person who claims not to find meta-discussion very interesting I’ve certainly gone on and on about this! I admit I’m a huge hypocrite but you can’t spend years and years observing this stuff without formulating views.
I agree with the argument that the internet is not representative of a broad cross-section of society, and admit that it’s precisely because of this reason (and my current ability to restrict my interactions on it pretty much to people from MTNW’s category 1) that I get so much out of it. For me it is a zone both of social creation (blog communities and twitterlife) and probably something like social avoidance: I socialise as much with my online friends (including in person) as I do with those I know through more conventional means.
I suspect too that the way in which people who simply don’t give a damn about any kind of norms can really mess things up is true in real life too, but there our population, physical density and social obligations (not to mention the way in which we are corporeally visible to each other) makes such destructive acts of mixin’ it up more difficult to initiate.
I was astounded to discover that projection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection worked all the way down the wires, across nations…in nano seconds.
Creeped me out with regards to poetry.
merc’s last post was Morpho.
Why with regards to poetry?
Some poetry is projective. When I send out a book I am insulated to some degree, though readers do contact, and reviewers review. In digital space one never knows what one may trigger, thankfully in my case, simply good people.
Poetry is seemingly invisible to those who would prefer arguing politics…though I have tried to introduce PB Shelley, The Mask Of Anarchy, epic fail.
merc’s last post was Morpho.
PS- just to go completely over the top with over intellectualising wankery I generally am an agonistic pluralist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agonism in all my views including this
“… we should not assume that conflict can be eliminated given sufficient time for deliberation and rational agreement. In other words, conflict has a non-rational or emotional component.” (op. cit.) With this I agree.
I didn’t mean to imply that PAS and The Hand Mirror are too different to relate, sorry for giving that impression. Certainly I’d aim for our commentariat to be as generally polite and informed as that at PAS, and I imagine that most of the people who do read THM are also reading Public Address (if the reverse were true we’d be a much bigger ripple in the pond!) I just wanted to make you aware of a couple of things going on behind the scenes that have been influencing the THM writers lately and which may not be a current factor at PAS.
I agree with MTNW about the issue of people playing by different rules. I’ve just been reading Robin Hobb’s Assassin series and your comment has prompted me to think of trolls like the Red Ship Raiders – their aim is not to engage in reasonable discussion or disagreement but to destroy. Appeasement cannot work.
The difficulty comes from identifying when someone is trolling and thus interested only in destruction or derailment, and when they are genuine. And it’s not even as simple as that, because in an environment where trolls are trying their tricks even regular commenters can start to engage in a way that tends in that direction or can be perceived by a moderator as being unhelpful to dragging things back to a constructive debate. This is especially hard when multiple different people are commenting anonymously (as opposed to any consistent handle, including a pseudonym) and it’s hard to tell if who is who. We have talked about ending anon comments, however there are a number of regular commenters who do so anon who could be left out if that happened.
Anyway, it does at times feel very much like writing for a blog, and moderating its comments, are very much like being under siege. (or Under Seige if you prefer, sorry little AUSA c mid 1990s in-joke there.) In a state of seige you make different decisions than during peace time.
Sorry about all the warfare metaphors. Not sure how that ended up happening. I should probably stop seeing blogging as analagous to military conflict!
Julie, I’m well aware of the damage trolls do to a moderator’s mindset and I sympathise, believe me. But the fact that you keep talking about trolls when people are talking about Anna’s ‘group sex’ thread is interesting, because I saw the thread before it got wiped, and there wasn’t any trollling on it.
In a way perhaps the warfare metaphors are useful, and what you’re dealing with here is something like post-traumatic stress disorder. If the perception of normal comments is being distorted by exposure to the trolling, that’s a problem, not a justification.
If I didn’t give a monkey’s about THM I wouldn’t be having this conversation. But five people have come up to me either in RL or in quiet corners of the net and said their degree of engagement with the site was damaged by that column of Anna’s and its subsequent moderation. (So the original post sits untouched, but all the dissent has vanished as if it never happened.) Basically, that either they intend to not go back, or they intend to still read but not comment. They’re all good-faith people. Carrying on as if nothing happened has not done anything to mitigate their genuine distress .
Since you bring AUSA up, Julie: online communities may not be representative of a broad cross-section of society, as it was pointed out above (although one could also ask: what is?), but some particular online communities are awfully reminiscent of some particular offline communities. Case in point: this whole debacle gave me strong flashbacks of my student politics days – not in an altogether positive way, obviously.
Emma (and others), I’m not trying to ignore that it ever happened, but to be honest I’m not sure what to do now, especially as at the time I wasn’t involved in the moderation. It’s not my blog anymore than it’s the blog of any one of the other writers. I don’t have some kind of overarching mod responsibility – no one does. In time I hope that we will be able to have a constructive on-blog discussion about it, but I don’t think that can happen yet.
I’m open to suggestions, although I’d note that no one emailed me privately about what happened (although I did make attempts to discuss it with a couple of others myself). So I feel a bit like many feel this is all my fault and that I have to fix it, which is a bit burdensome at the moment. Also Anna is my friend, and her happiness is important to me. First and foremost a blog needs to be a place that the blogger(s) feel ok to be. I don’t want this to turn into a discussion about Anna.
As to the post being there but the comments not. This was my decision, although I checked it with Anna and the others first. My initial response, when I finally caught up (and in fact I still haven’t entirely caught up and read it all as a piece), was to close comments to allow the heat to go off. G made the valid point to me privately that this created some issues because of some comments being deleted and others not, so I hid the lot, again with Anna’s approval. Pure trolling may not have been in that thread itself (I haven’t checked) but we were having issues with trolls across the site at the time.
I think perhaps part of the problem comes from the idea that there is some Hand Mirror view on the matter of group sex. There isn’t. As you’ll see (if you are reading) from the debate we’re having about porn there are a variety of views amongst the writers themselves, as well as the broader commentariat. We have a guest post going up tomorrow from someone disagreeing with Enid’s original Pr0n Wars post. One of the things I’m trying to move the blog towards is reflecting some of the diversity amongst feminist thinking. Our current group of bloggers do tend to agree much more than we disagree, and I can see we are going to have to do some thinking about how we agree to disagree, especially in an environment where people (bloggers and commenters) don’t actually know each other in real life. Looks like it is going to be a rocky road
I am serious about the suggestions. It may be better to make them privately than in this public forum. If so I am very open to email contact, however as my work is quite crazy at the moment it may take me a while to respond.
Julie, I have no issue with you personally and definetly don’t consider it your fault at all or that you are responsible for THM.
Happy to put my hand up there, I actually asked that the comments be hidden since in its eventually purged state – where people were free to attack me but not I to respond – it was not a very fair record of the conversation, to put it mildly. My preference would have been in fact for all the comments to be visible, including mine, but hey, it’s not my blog. And I asked you, Julie, simply because you’re the one who came forward.
For what it’s worth, a number of people, mostly unkown to me at the time, got in touch in the days after the incident to express views similar to those reported by Emma, so there might be a bit of a raw nerve there. Whether or not it’s something that you should collectively take on board it’s not for me to say, nor do I have a stake in it at this point.